Phoenix 101: History

The most precious treasure of old downtown Phoenix is in flux. This could provide the city a long-overdue opportunity. Or it could go sideways in a hurry. I'm writing, of course, about Union Station.

According to CBRE, the big real-estate services firm "has been retained as exclusive representative to offer qualified investors the opportunity to purchase fee interest in the iconic…Union Station site in downtown Phoenix at 401 W. Harrison Street." It goes on, "Depending on the vision of a new owner, the Property may be eligible for a myriad of monetary and tax advantaged programs…"

Sprint, which has used the station to house switching equipment since the late 1980s, intends to move out before the end of next year. The Union Pacific Railroad's ground lease ends in March 2023, a century after the building was completed. Now what?

One of the most popular columns on this site is my history of Union Station (with photos) — you can read it here. The Spanish revival building brought together the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads in one full-service station. Three years after its completion, the SP finished its northern main line and routed most of its passenger trains through Phoenix. The city was served by multiple intercity trains a day through the 1960s.

The last Amtrak train called here in 1996. The state refused to partner with the SP (merged with Union Pacific the same year) to maintain the west line between Phoenix and Wellton to passenger-train standards. Phoenix became the largest American city by far with no intercity rail service. Sprint — which was started by the SP — using the depot for switching equipment helped protect and save it. Being on the National Register of Historic Places wouldn't have stopped Joe Arpaio's jail-building mania and other losses in the Warehouse District. Mesa lost its lovely SP depot to arson…no one cared.

Who will care now?

A conversation on one of the Phoenix history pages of Facebook got me thinking about the thousands of cuts that bled downtown nearly to death. It was about the old Main Post Office at Central and Fillmore, now mostly used by ASU but contained some incomplete or wrong information. Still, a useful jumping off point.

Back in 2013, I wrote a three-part series entitled "What Killed Downtown" (see here, here, and here). It's still the gold standard on the subject. But the tale of the Post Office illuminates it in microcosm.

This lovely Spanish-revival building was completed in 1936, designed by Lescher & Mahoney, the architects responsible for many of Phoenix's finest buildings. Among them are the Orpheum Theater, Brophy College Chapel, El Zariba Shrine Auditorium (former home to the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum), Phoenix Title and Trust Building (today's Orpheum Lofts), Hanny's, and the Palms Theater.

It was planned in the 1920s to replace the Post Office segment of the old Federal Building in the government block at Van Buren and First Avenue. With Sen. Carl Hayden's backing, it was originally intended to be six stories tall and closer to the central business district. But because of expensive land, the site was move north across from the new Westward Ho and the height was lowered. Building it was among the myriad federal projects that lifted Phoenix out of the Great Depression.

My mother told me I was "a city kid" and a "desert rat." She was right about the first, but not the second. I was a child of the oasis, growing up in what are now the historic districts north of downtown and in the old city.

It's almost all gone now. Every time I'm back in Phoenix, I am struck my how ugly it is, especially with the proliferation of skeleton trees and heat-radiating gravel in places they should not be. If this is the price paid to accommodate ever-expanding sprawl, it's a devil's bargain, a short hustle. With the enormous numbers of newcomers and population churn, people don't even know what has been lost.

One of the most heartbreaking losses was the Japanese flower gardens along Baseline Road.(above). An agricultural trust could have prevented it. But the feral greed to replace it with faux Spanish-Tuscan crapola was too much to overcome.

A reminder: Phoenix is at or near the convergence of five rivers in the world's wettest desert. Scores of shade trees are native. With the alluvial soil of the Salt River Valley, anything will grow here.

But as on the national level (only 26,000 history majors now), the loss of memory is a dangerous thing. Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Thanks especially to the priceless McCulloch Bros. Collection at the ASU archives, we can struggle. I only wish more of these images were in color.

Here are a few views of authentic Phoenix. Click on an image for a larger view:

Most of the historical photos on this site show the rise of a handsome small city, with commercial buildings, stores, churches, and warehouses.

But single-family houses and apartments proliferated in and near the original townsite even as monuments such as the Heard Building and Luhrs Tower rose. People were living downtown before it became desirable again in recent years. Above are the Dennis and Jacobs Mansions on Monroe between Second and Third Streets along "Millionaires Row," built in the 1890s. They were demolished in the 1950s for surface parking lots.

Rosson House, restored in Heritage Square, was designed by architect George Franklin Barber — he sold his designs by mail order. It was completed in 1895 at 139 N. Sixth Street. The Stevens-Haustgen Bungalow is nearby, also restored.

Most of the residences downtown were more modest. For example, the 1935 City Directory shows homes for Mrs. Della Jeanette at 129 S. Third Avenue, Mr. Samuel Lopez at 133 S., and Mr. Nestor Chavez at 333 S. Third Ave. Some were businesses where the owners lived on an upper floor. But others were simple, single-story houses gradually giving way to the expanding Warehouse District. The same is true along south Second Street, including parts of Chinatown, connected by Madison and Jackson streets, Gold and Paris alleys.

Valley Center, now the Chase Tower, under construction in 1972. At 483 feet, it remains the city's tallest building (Jeremy Butler photo).

The Republic recently ran a story to answer the question of why Phoenix lacks the skyscrapers that are one defining characteristic of other big cities. One of the problems of a place with so many newcomers is the loss of historical knowledge. So the story was, at best, incomplete.

The two big reasons given were automobile-based sprawl and a "polycentric" city with many cores. But both apply to other cities with much higher and more distinctive downtown skylines. Los Angeles comes to mind. It has "downtowns" in Century City, West LA, and Hollywood. It is a city built around the car, although it has rebuilt an extensive rail transit system.

But downtown LA, which is staging an astonishing comeback, is home to an impressive skyline. The Wilshire Grand, finished in 2017 and standing 1,100 feet with its spire is more than twice as tall as Phoenix's Chase Tower. The same is true of the U.S. Bank Tower, completed in 1989. About 28 skyscrapers there are taller than Chase.

Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte have cheaper outlying land and sprawl, but each has a much more impressive skyline than Phoenix.

One big reason downtown Phoenix lacks taller buildings is its proximity to Sky Harbor International Airport. Valley National Bank wanted its new headquarters to be even taller, but the plan was quashed by the FAA. Sky Harbor is not much closer to downtown than Logan airport to downtown Boston, but Logan's runways primarily run southwest to northeast. In Phoenix, the runways are east-to-west and airplanes usually fly directly south of downtown. Gaining altitude means expending more jet fuel, especially in summer. And Sky Harbor has enormous influence at city hall. This has prevented doable towers at a higher number of floors at Third Avenue and Van Buren and further west.

Today's Valdemar A. Cordova Municipal Court Building occupies the site of young Phoenix's first major theater, the Patton Grand, which opened in 1898. The new motion-picture industry was just getting started, so the theater hosted a variety of events such as plays and concerts.

It was also a point of pride in a town with a population of 5,544, which had made it through the national financial panics and local droughts and floods that characterized that decade. The theater sat 1,200 people. It also boasted hefty backstage spaces, based on the photo above, with room for curtains, lighting, and scenery.

E.M. Dorris, of the prominent merchant family, bought the theater at the end of 1899. It became the Dorris Opera House, the name by which most old Phoenicians and history buffs know it. Until the completion of the Phoenix Union High School Auditorium, the Dorris was the heartbeat of civic events, from traveling musicians, plays, and speakers, to political and union gatherings. It then settled in as a movie theater.

But, at Third Avenue and Washington, it was only one of many movie houses within walking distance of the city center or the streetcars. Let's take a stroll to some of them (click on photo for a larger image).

KJZZ had a story about a pilot program unveiled at 15th Avenue and Butler Drive, making it "the first neighborhood to install gates to close their (sic) alleys to outsiders…designed to prevent criminal activity and illegal dumping."

It was spun as a "celebration," but it made me sad.

Alleys have a colorful history in early Phoenix. Many had names, such as Melinda's Alley and the vice-ridden Paris Alley downtown. As the Phoenix grew, so-called service alleys were part of the cityscape. Trash trucks used them as burly garbagemen heaved the contents of aluminum garbage cans into the back of the vehicles to be crushed and stored (in Scottsdale, it was the Refuse Wranglers). Utility crews employed the alleys for maintenance and meter-reading.

They were a delightful playground growing up in mid-century Phoenix. Alleys were the battlefield for our childhood conflicts: Flinging oranges, dirt clods, and, the highest escalation, rocks at each other. Secondary weapons included spears cut from oleanders. (Don't believe the nonsense about innocent children; of course, today we little boys being little boys would be diagnosed on a "spectrum" and heavily medicated).

I remember one battle where we were hunkered down in a makeshift fort as our opponents hurled rocks at us. One little boy named Harry kept running up within a few feet and throwing a stone into the fort. But I had a Wrist Rocket slingshot and after several close encounters with Harry, he came again, an angelic smile on his face — until I let go a decent-sized pebble into his chest at high velocity. I still feel a little guilty. But we won the rock fight.